Television is certainly one of the most influential forces of our time. Through the device called a television set or TV, viewers are able to receive news, sports, entertainment, information, and commercials. A few events stand out as extremely important in the history of television. The invention of the black-and-white TV set and the first broadcasts of television signals in 1939 and 1940 initiated the television age. This was followed by color television and its huge popularity starting in the 1950s. Cable and satellite television began competing with broadcast networks in the 1970s. In this same list must go the development and popularization of the VCR (video cassette recorder) starting in the 1970s and 1980s.
The VCR marks one of the most important events in the history of television because, for the first time, the VCR gave the viewers control of what they could watch on their TV sets and at what time. The VCR spawned the video rental and sales market, and today, VCRs are commonplace.
Now, a new innovation makes recording television programs even more convenient: the digital video recorder, or DVR. The television signal comes into the digital video recorder's built-in tuner through an antenna, cable, or satellite. If the signal comes from an analog antenna or cable, it goes into an encoder, which converts the data from analog to digital form. From the encoder, the signal is sent to two different places: first, to an internal hard drive for storage, and second, to a decoder, which converts the signal back to analog and sends it to the television for viewing. For a satellite signal and for cable and antenna signals that are already digital, the encoder is not necessary.
Although the digital video recorder performs much the same functions as a VCR, there are some important differences. First, a digital video recorder is tape-less and has no removable media. With a VCR, the device itself is merely a recording tool; the blank cassette is the removable media. In a digital video recorder, the media and tool are one and the same, which is advantageous because buying and cataloging tapes are unnecessary. Second, because the digital video recorder typically stores the audio and video content in digital form on a hard drive, which is a random access device, the digital video recorder can access or skip between a variety of locations within the content without needing to start at the beginning and perform a sequential search.
Because of this ability to easily move between locations of the content, the viewing habits of users are becoming increasingly segmented, as viewers prefer the ability to skip around a program rather than watching it sequentially from start to finish. Further, viewers increasingly do not watch entire shows; instead, they just watch the portions in which they are most interested. This trend is readily apparent in the way people view media in the following three examples. First, for recorded programming on digital video recorders, viewers frequently skip past commercials, time-outs of sports events, movie credits, or slow spots. They also typically skip segments of content, for example using a thirty second fast forward command or a ten second rewind command. Second, viewers use file-sharing of content, where the viewers download and share just the portion of a program that is of the most interest. Third, in movies, viewers may skip to the appropriate chapter or special feature that they wish to watch, using a menu or table of contents.
Unfortunately, viewers do not typically know in which content they are interested until they see it. For example, if a viewer has recorded a program for later watching, the viewer may have heard or read that a particularly interesting, unusual, newsworthy, funny, or controversial event occurred sometime in the program, but the viewer does not have a way to find that event in the program without extensive searching. Further, even if the viewer has seen the segment of interest once, the viewer may experience difficulty in finding it again, because the viewer cannot necessarily remember the exact location within the program.
Thus, there is a need for a better technique to aid viewers in finding content of interest within programs. Although the aforementioned problems have been described in the context of a digital video recorder, they may apply to any electronic device that presents media content, whether the content is video, audio, video and audio, or still images.